Subject: OFF-TOPIC: The dangerous life of the plug-ins and extension writer
From: [email-masked] (Ty Sarna)
To: Multiple recipients of list <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 20 Apr 1996 02:07:43 -0700

In article <[email-masked]>,
robert hood <[email-masked]> wrote:
> It would undermine my business, my efforts, and my faith in what NewTek is
> trying to accomplish.  They are well aware of the product that I produce,
> and that any decision to adopt a similar--competitive--product and included it
> in LightWave as part of the purchase price would seriously injure me.  What
> if they suddenly decided to create a WaveFilter clone, or their own particle
> animation system.  The results would be the same for other plugin and
> third-party developers.

Welcome to life as an extension writer.

If your extension is truly useful, one of three things will happen:

- The company producing the main package is in trouble or not on the
  ball, and nothing will happen.
- The company will adopt your solution as official, or
- The company will adopt another, usually better (technically and/or
  marketingwise) solution.

Things that are add-ons one day become expected standard features the
next.

Remember Dos-2-Dos? Commodore adopted CrossDOS instead. How about
networking -- Commodore adopted (or would have) an in-house solution,
Envoy, instead of an existing one like ENLAN-DFS. How about all those
companies that sold TCP/IP stacks for Windows 3.1? It's built into
Windows '95 now. Me, right now I'm selling printer software that adds
24 bit drivers for some printers that workbench doesn't support out of
the box. Do I expect that to last forever? Do I really think that if the
Amiga survives that it won't get 24 bit printing built in some day, just
to protect me and the other printer driver authors? No. It's not
reasonable. Maybe they'll adopt my technology. Probably not. But
_something_ is going to happen eventually.

If you're plugging holes in a system, you have to expect that the
producer of the system may decide to plug it themselves. Maybe, just
maybe, they'll buy your solution. Or maybe they'll buy somebody elses,
or write their own. Either way, you can't expect extension products to
last forever.

And of course, the more fundamentally useful the extension is, like a
scripting language, the more likely it is to get killed off by it's own
success.

Sometimes this happens right away, and you lose totally. Sometimes it
takes a long while, and you make some good money in the meantime. But
chances are that most extensions will die before the system itself does.

If the company does too much at once, of course, they'll kill off the
whole extensions market.  But equally, they can't let their product sit
still with holes in it, or they loose out to their competitiors. And
some of their enhancements will kill off some extensions. 

The only things you can do as an extension writer are to realize that
this is how the world works and be prepared, or in some cases, make your
extension better than what the company builds in, so there is still
incentive to buy your extension.

I'm sorry that you may have lost this time (and only may have, since
this is just speculation, though reasonable speculation, about what the
Java connection is). I felt the same way the first time I lost. But if
you're going to play the game, you have to realize that the odds favor
the house.